John Baltimore, Merlin of Avalon and the world's highest authority on magic, meets with Ty to discuss Iris. Darling, Iris's "soul sister," goes hunting in Overworld.
John Baltimore, Merlin of Avalon, head of an ancient order for earth's magical defense, receives a visit -- and news -- from his friend and ally, Sorcerer of Midtown Ty Kemble, while excavating an ancient object of power from a recently formed sinkhole.
Darling, Iris Penner's feral, lycanth-like sister soul, goes hunting in one of the darkest corners of Overworld.
Iris, still withdrawn in her soulscape, visits the graveyard there, searching for answers.
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Written by Steve and Robin Pool
Voiced by Emily Woo Zeller, with Freya Kingsley as Rigan
Sound Design and Editing by DSS (Dissecting Sound & Soul). Sound effects provided by ZapSplat
Intro song “Plastic Stars” by Corey Distler https://soundcloud.com/deadmentalkingpdx
Outro song “Hope” by Resonance AU
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Copyright (c) 2022 by Uncle Robot Media, LLC
SAYONARAVILLE: MANHATTAN
EPISODE 6: MERLIN OF AVALON
INTRO: The following series contains adult themes, strong language, violence, sexuality, and drug use. Listener discretion is advised.
[INTRO MUSIC: "Plastic Stars" by Corey Distler]
Late, chilly evening be damned, Advance Construction kept their word and sent a digging crew and a backhoe to an empty field just north of the bird sanctuary in Marblehead, Massachusetts at 9:30pm on Friday night. John Baltimore, the hallowed Merlin of Avalon -- the world’s highest magical authority, like the Catholic Pope, but over the eldritch domain -- had personally requested a special crew, one experienced in mystical dig sites, and no one at the construction firm was about to refuse Merlin Baltimore. That they had to offer holiday overtime pay and cash bonuses to all of the workers just to get them to show up didn’t matter, and none of those extra costs would appear on Avalon’s invoice. Everyone on that shift was told that the Merlin would be on site, monitoring everything that they did, so they were especially diligent and quiet. Police from the local precinct were also told to stay away, and they complied.
If he were honest, the Merlin had come to Marblehead this night not because of concerns about this latest in a rash of recent discoveries of long-lost mystical artifacts just suddenly popping up unannounced in random places around the globe or of the disquieting build-up of unstable magic energies along North America’s Eastern Seaboard similar to that on its western shores 22 years ago -- a troubling issue to be sure -- but because he both hated and loved magic and was completely obsessed by it. That it was ruining the world, and him, did not deter his addiction in the least. And so, he had to see for himself this latest relic that suddenly, out of the blue, had showed up on an island east of Salem, home to Old America’s first witch hunters. If he could manage it, he planned to take the item in question back to Avalon, regardless of any objections the Massachusetts government, the Northeast Coalition, or the Embassy of Annwfn (On Fin) -- home to the Tuatha de’ Danann, humanity’s Otherworld allies -- might have.
Yet he also had strong reservations about his plan. He keenly understood that handling magical relics of extraordinary power could be very dangerous. Powerful and game-changing for a nation or a government, this kind of magic was also very much an aggressive cancer, hungry and invasive. For humankind to survive its current travails and carve a future for itself, magic like this had to be purged. The time for sentimentality had long passed.
Others, powerful people in the shadows, felt exactly as he did. They had all agreed, in secret, to work towards ripping all magic out of the world, both “bad” magic and “good” magic, for they believed there really was no such thing as “good” magic. His participation in this underground conspiracy could cost him his position and possibly his life, but John continued undeterred. He was under no illusions that this wasn’t a betrayal of all that the Merlins before him had worked so hard for. But John had no loyalty to them, or their warped religion -- for that’s what Avalon had become during the past 1,500 years. Let it all fade away to dust and myths and childrens’ stories.
Magic had already cost John personally all the things he had cherished most in life, taken his only daughter, caused his wife to leave, ended his academic career, cost him his home, most of his relationships, and a good piece of his sanity, as well. Before his ascension in Avalon, it had left him friendless and alone. It had twisted his morals. It had damaged his soul.
But magic had also given him focus and purpose, provided strength, earned respect and great wealth, made him into one of the most influential people on earth, protected him from harm, and established within him a version of inner peace, unshakably cold and heartless. Heart broken too many times to endure, John was more than willing to accept that. Maybe it was why the Merlin Merlin, the original and founder of the order, had the foresight all those centuries ago to pre-ordain that John, a future traitor to the cause, would be the one to lead the world out of its greatest crisis, when everything was at risk of being swallowed whole by a metaphorical and literal abyss.
Becoming the Merlin hadn’t just made John powerful and important; it made him jealous. This was quite unlike him. Long before he’d become the Merlin, before he’d become entangled and swallowed up by magic, John had been a popular high school history teacher, known for his generosity, warmth, and sense of humor. When he’d finally been handed all the power and secret knowledge of Merlin, the overwhelming collected memories and experience of the previous 23 Merlins now residing within him had warped him. He no longer trusted anyone, and he no longer wanted anyone but himself to possess power derived from magic. Barring that -- for the rational part of him still acknowledged that as long as there was magic, he could not keep it from others -- he wanted to ensure that no one else ever surpassed his own mastery. It was only in accepting the awful truth of what magic was and was doing to everyone on earth that he had stopped being magic’s ally and had started being its enemy. Like the recovering alcoholic, John had known that salvation would be found only in total prohibition. That was blasphemous thinking for the world’s foremost protector of magic. But it was already too late for him. Maybe it wasn’t too late for everyone else, though.
A few days earlier, following a small earthquake, a twenty-foot magic-seeping sinkhole had formed next to the bird sanctuary in Marblehead, just west of the Ocean Avenue Inversion Barrier, a construct meant to keep the Fey Terrene from bleeding further into earth space along dimensional tears.
At the sinkhole’s center, just a few miles from the Salem Spaceport on Bakers Island, sat a broken, rune-covered plinth. John had wanted to see this enchanted block at the bottom of the magic crater for himself, but both the Avalonian Mages’ Council and the esteemed Governor of Massachusetts had strongly argued against that. The City of Marblehead had already evacuated local residents, and the National Guard had already placed mystical seals, declaring that it now considered the matter “handled”. Merlin Baltimore, however, with outside-the-lines help from the Northeast Coalition's version of the Pentagon, had overruled them all, insisting that the column base be extracted and taken to Avalon in the custody of Round Table knights. Declared an Artifact of the World, the plinth was therefore no one’s property. End of subject.
Magic had countless supporters and advocates. John’s conviction that magic was only the latest “broken reed” upon which humankind must lean at its peril was not widely shared. Far more people trusted in it than not. They’d point out how it did what technology and human will could not: it “fixed” the climate crisis and saved the oceans (if you could call that salvation -- it certainly gave a new definition to the concept of “rewilding”); it leveled the world’s playing fields, breaking up previously enduring nation states into smaller, more self-reliant, regional alignments of like-minded peoples and allowed those who were always weaker the chance to finally stand up to those who’d always been stronger and more aggressive; it allowed people to eat and be clothed and sheltered and cared-for in places where such necessities were once mistaken for privilege; economic injustices were righted; racial injustices met their reckonings; ravaging, terrible diseases and cancers were ended; torturous mental and emotional illnesses could be cured without the need for painful pharmaceuticals; parents could with certainty know what really was best for their children; people no longer had to be afraid of death. Harmony, for much of the world, had finally been achieved. That is, if you believed all those lies.
For a long time, he had tried to keep his newfound convictions to himself, camouflaging them beneath a veneer of cordiality, patience, and polite professionalism. Exposing those beliefs, especially at the Camera Arcanum, the seat of Avalon’s authority, was dangerous.
His secret allies in the crusade to save the world from magic had all agreed to remain anonymous. No one member knew the identities of any of the others. There were no clandestine meetings or secret handshakes -- all those involved understood the precarious risks that could come from any kind of obvious, mutual association. Only infrequent, coded communications were allowed. No one person in the group held any authority over any other. Each member had intuitively understood the shared goals and their own job within them. So John was left largely free to act on his own, facelessly, within this conspiracy. Which was good, because none of his associates would have ever risked exposing themselves to the Merlin or his dangerous squad of Eldritch Knights.
With no one to confide in, John had fallen deeper into depression. He had also begun to show signs of growing paranoia. The depression he could hide. Not so the paranoia.
At some point, John had begun to experiment, illegally, with some of the darkest forms of magic, justifying it to himself by invoking the need to “fight fire with fire”, corruption be damned. And he was the Merlin now, anyway, so who was going to tell him that he couldn’t? Though many at the time could see that he had been slipping mentally and perhaps spiritually, he himself had refused to acknowledge that, and no one had dared to challenge him. Predictably, whenever his dark power grew, some part of John’s humanity died. Among his inner circle, people had begun to speculate -- not openly, of course -- that John had actually begun the process of turning himself into a recaster, a person who replaces figurative or literal parts of himself with artificial, mystically-charged parts. Whether or not that was true, he had definitely become a parasite, a magic wielder who harvested mana from others, sometimes through harriers -- illegal mana collectors.
“Merlin Baltimore,” Danny the foreman said, in a thick Boston accent, “we been tryin’ to strap it up and lift out that plinth-thing, but we can’t seem to move it enough to even get the straps under it. It’s like it’s glued to the ground or somethin’. What would you like us to do?” The two stood in the rain, just beyond the light ring of the dig site.
“Show me.”
Stepping carefully across the wet, slippery grass, they made their way towards the open maw.
Surrounded by blazing lights, the pit before them steamed, releasing ghostly-white billowing clouds. Surrounding this, Eldritch Knights with automatic weapons from John’s security detail kept a tense vigil. Most of the dig team workers nervously smoked, tapping cell phone screens in the cold darkness, safely outside the lighted circle. Down in the hole, an occasional ripple of purple lightning arced across the jagged top of the broken plinth, as if warning others to stay away. As proof, several shattered, burned shovels lay scattered in the surrounding dirt. John’s men, all experienced hands in the hazardous digging of mystical places, knew enough to avoid getting burned themselves, but their fear radiated, fueled by this inanimate but still-dangerous thing lying beneath cursed earth.
John studied it for a few moments. Crouching on the balls of his feet, he traced its outline with an extended finger. “Hmm. That’s why it can’t be lifted out. See those glyphs at the twelve-o’clock, three-o’clock, six-o’clock, and nine-o’clock positions?” After everything, John was still a teacher at heart. “Those are basically anchors. We’re going to have to sever them before we can lift the stone out.”
Danny looked troubled. “So...how do we do that, then? Do you have to read some secret code word or cast some kinda hex on it?”
“No. The glyphs holding down the coffin are written in a language that I’ve never come across before. It’s possible that they’ve never even been uttered on our world before. But the good news is that we don’t actually have to read them to dispel them. We just need a Limbo sting and a little sacred geometry. If I find each glyph’s mathematical points of convergence and change the variables, they’ll break apart.”
Danny’s anxiety was beginning to show. “So, will you be able to do this tonight, Merlin Baltimore, or should I just send my crew home and plan to come back tomorrow?”
“No, I think we can finish tonight, if that’s okay with you. I shouldn’t need more than twenty or thirty minutes to disarm this. Why don’t you and your men take a little break. Give me some space and alone time here.”
John pulled his tablet from his bag and began typing on its screen. For such magical hacking jobs, he had created a digital cantrip that analyzed and reported on the properties of spells or enchanted items, measuring and recording magical energy outputs through the tablet’s mystically-augmented wifi antenna, like a mass spectrometer analyzing particles suspended within a gas.
The cantrip began by identifying hotter and cooler spots -- more and fewer eldritch lines -- within the energy fields of each glyph trace. Measuring the differences in each dot’s proximity to others within a sample square, focusing only on those in predictable, repeating patterns, his program grouped hot and cool spot collections into pairs. Relationships between pairs expressed themselves as repeating, interconnected rhombuses:
A plus B plus C plus D equals 4x
AB BC CD DA
One half times AC times BD
John laughed as he examined their dimensions. He began dictating on his smartphone. “Looks like the sorcerer who created this was a bit of a diva. These lines of mystical force create diamond-shaped paths.
“Diamonds make sense. They are strong and beautiful. Whoever designed this must have loved the real ones. And just like them, this particular binding magic appears especially resistant to brute-force attacks. Note the shattered and burned anti-magic shovels scattered around the dig site. Fortunately, diamonds almost always have inherent weak spots that one can exploit, if one knows where to look. And fortunately, I do.”
He opened a drawing program on his tablet and, using an ensorcelled stylus, began to sketch an intricate pentagram on its screen. John loved digital sorcery -- it was so easy, so clean, and so portable compared to old-fashioned magic that often relied on blood or wood or iron or something written on some thing’s stretched skin. He thanked the gods of the Silicon Valley for creating marvelous devices like his tablet.
This particular spell was one that John had learned not from Merlin but from his first teacher, the Ukrainian necromancer Alexei Gorlov. John opened a pinhole gate into Limbo and withdrew only a filament of that place’s unmaking magic. With great care, he willed the thread down into the embossed trenches of the first glyph, following the path that his mapping program had created. As it flowed, threads unmade the nexuses in the rhombuses that joined A to B, B to C, C to D, and D to A. Eldritch lines slashed by the Limbo thread began to unravel and fade, disintegrating the glyph bit by bit.
At first, the magic surrounding the plinth fought back. Purple electrical sparks that had destroyed his dig team’s shovels arced out and onto the Limbo thread, which burned and hissed as the two opposing forces touched. But Limbo’s unmaking magic proved stronger, and, millimeter by millimeter, it continued to uncreate more and more of the sealing energy. After a few minutes, the first glyph shattered and evaporated in a flash of light. It didn’t take long for the remaining glyphs protecting this artifact to fall.
“Rather unorthodox way to dispel magic, Merlin. I like it. I’d love to have you teach me that little trick sometime.”
“Good evening, Ty. Nice to see you.”
“You say that with your words, but your expression shows something different. Still, I appreciate you agreeing to a meeting.” A full, magically-generated projection of the sorcerer-barkeeper appeared before John. The image was occasionally glitchy and the voice was tinny and hollow, but it was nonetheless an impressive consciousness-projection without the need for an astral medium. One more tool from Shieldmaiden’s vast toolbox.
John replied, “Happy to speak with you and glad for your expertise in helping to identify this Artifact of the World. Any displeasure you see is practically a job requirement now. So, yes, the idea of increasing or diminishing eldritch energies as mathematical expressions has been a rather useful practice originally developed by my former mentor, Alexi Gorloff.”
“A clever and interesting guy, for sure.”
“You knew Alexi?”
“Well, I try to know anyone who’s either a useful ally or a serious threat.”
“And which of those did he turn out to be?”
“I’m still here, so let's say ‘ally’.” Ty looked down into the hole. “Ooh, is that part of a Lemurian Wind Gate? Haven’t seen one of those in a long time.”
“Is that what that is? Thank you for identifying it. I had no idea. That will save my staff some time in running it down. I assume then that it’s some sort of portal for transdimensional use?”
“More like a fixed location marker for a large teleportation network built by the ancient mystics of Atlantis. It could open arcane gates across the world and across dimensions. Probably a good thing that it appears to be on the fritz.” Ty’s projection waved its finger up and down to where the full height of the column should have been. “Speaking of which, where’s the rest?”
“Fair question. We’ll be keeping an eye out for any remaining parts. Can the gate be fixed if it’s restored?”
“The enchantment’s coding is probably permanently fubared, especially if it was abruptly snapped while in use. Even if you were to reconnect all the missing pieces and reformat the thing, I wouldn’t trust it to safely open up to any places you’d want to go. My advice? Better to keep it in its current state as a lawn ornament.”
“Noted. Thank you for your input. I’m assuming, by the way, that you are using Shieldmaiden to project your image from Bubbles.”
Ty smiled.
“Of course you are. You know, we are going to have to have a conversation about that creation of yours at some point.”
“Why? Hasn’t Avalon found it a useful resource?”
“It has. But I worry that it’s a tad too useful for the likes of you, Otherworldian. I also don’t like that Avalon doesn’t know all of its capabilities. Thirdly, it makes me nervous that it’s in private hands, even if those hands are yours.”
“It’s fine, John. And I have it in a very protected space. No one’s going to steal her from me or hack into her. Also, as I’ve promised before, I won’t abuse it for my own personal gain or amusement or violate any anti-scrying privacy ordinances or data collection treaties.”
“And what’s your promise worth these days, Tethra?”
Ty’s expression darkened. “Please don’t use that name. I left it behind long ago. Also, what the fuck!?”
“Apologies, Ty,” John said. “I didn’t mean that. That was very ill-mannered of me. I do trust you, you know. You’ve more than earned that. It’s probably just fatigue talking. Forgive me?”
“Yeah, of course. Already forgotten. I would say that you could really use a vacation, but..."
“But?”
“That’s why I asked to meet. I have news.”
“Good or bad? I’m assuming bad if you’re telling me out here instead of waiting for me to get back to Avalon.”
“It’s just news for now. You can decide the tone of it for yourself. Remember that human girl, Iris Penner, who married ‘his greatness’ the Lord Arawn, all those years ago, then later died in the fight to stop the Apocalypse?”
“Yes, I remember her.”
“Yeah, well, believe it or not, she’s alive again and back in Manhattan. Don’t ask me how. It’s not that I don’t trust her. I do, actually. Fully. She’s a truly good person and, potentially, a great ally. But...I’ve got this funny feeling about her and her mysterious return that I can’t seem to shake, and I thought I should loop you in. I guess that’s me heading off you finding out on your own and trying something tasteless like attempting to bring her in. Let me keep eyes on her, instead, under my protection.”
John nodded. “That sounds like the wise course.” For now, he thought to himself.
One of the darkest shitholes to stain Jersey City, a blight just across the river from the richest place on earth, The Stagg had never failed to show its patrons a good time. As far as strip clubs along the riverfront went, The Stagg had no competition. Everyone knew that.
On the Overworld side, the club was especially festive on this particular night. Some famous porn succubuses had decided to drop in and hold an impromptu clinic on lap dances, fellatio, and tabletop sex. That had been a real crowd pleaser, all paid for by the patrons with bottomless drinks and precious coins and magicked objects -- like iron flasks with imprisoned djinn and their kind trapped inside, very popular with the girls -- that were shoved into lacy bras and panties. And, of course, line after line of soul dust for the snorting.
After the fiend cuties had left, the real fun had begun. The Stagg was a nightmarish haunt for cruel demons who engaged in the acquisition and sale of lost mortal souls, particularly those that belonged to runaways, addicts, and suicides. The Stagg had made a name for itself as a purveyor of this particular type of victim. Self-harm and self-loathing always made souls taste better.
Over decades and centuries, the demons who ran the darkside version of The Stagg had built up a sizable inventory of human misery that any shitbag buyer would want: underaged prostitute-addicts who the demons like to dress up as naughty Catholic school girls; utterly lost and hopeless emo kids who had, in life, been gutted by heroin and other opiods; young men and women who had been molested as children by trusted adults at the cost of their faith in humanity and the divine; exploited, nearly-illiterate immigrants fleeing violence and death preyed upon and sex trafficked or sold into slavery by human coyotes; homeless LGBTQ+ teenagers thrown out of religiously-zealous homes, and so on. That the place had for years done a brisk business in soul trafficking the most damaged of humans was a testament to its powerful friends and protectors.
A new batch of the recently slain were dragged crying and screaming from the back room onto the main stage. Several of them had been brutally beaten -- those were the ones who hadn’t resisted the bruising beasts who’d manned the transport vans. Those who had fought back had been seized, if not by the arms and legs, then by the hair, and pumped full of black magic before being dragged into a back room and sexually assaulted. They now toppled like broken toys before the crowd of hungry predators. Not one of the hostages about to be sold had made it through the night undamaged.
The buyers, some of the worst -- meaning the most influential and powerful -- abyssals, infernals, fiends, wicked fey, undead, and elemental beasts, were more than ready to prolong the nightmare. A feast for unholy animals that walked on two legs and wore expensive suits.
Before the emcee -- a cheery, drunken, frat-boy frog demon who bellowed more than spoke -- could start the show, a commotion at the front of the club turned every head. One of The Stagg’s biggest and most brutal enforcers, a toothy jackal-like beast by the name of Deeds, cried out and collapsed. The soul of a young woman, a near perfect mirror of Iris but with very short, chopped hair, jumped on Deed’s belly and pressed a holy symbol into his skin with a burning hiss.
“Excuse me!” the young woman cried out, in a surprisingly loud voice. “Yo! Everyone give me your attention!” Everyone did. A few of Deeds’s comrades-in-arms began to circle but hesitated before the woman’s sinister smile -- full of razor-sharp lycanth fangs. The bouncers retreated to confer. What was a mortal para-beast doing in the Overworld?
“Thank you. I didn’t want to have to kick you boys’ asses before I’d said my piece.” A few of the patrons murmured.
Now facing the crowd of monsters staring back, the young woman continued. “You can call me Darling. I’m here looking for my sister, Amelie. I think she might be partying with you all here tonight.”
No one in the crowd moved or said a word. Some grinned, thinking this delicious little poppet looked like a delightful appetizer before the night’s main course. More than a few others entertained darker thoughts, like dropping her body into the Styx.
Malevorn, a bald, bright red, barrel-shaped tub of a demon dressed in an Italian silk suit pushed his way forward and stepped up within a few feet of Darling. Deeds began to moan and shift. Darling leapt off, burning him again with her holy symbol, before straightening and giving Malevorn a shit-eating grin.
“Please stop torturing my employee, Miss...Darling was it?” Malevorn rolled his head to one side, cracking his neck loudly, before he continued. “I don’t believe your sister is here, sweetheart. I don’t have any workers here tonight by the name of ‘Amelie’. Not their real names at least.”
Darling shook her head and pointed past the little stages with poles running up to the ceiling, over to a frightened group of soon-to-be-victims huddled together. A look of murder hung in her gaze. “Not workers.”
A wave of discomfort rippled through the crowd. This event was supposed to be protected. A human soul, lycanth-tainted, equipped with at least one holy weapon and who knew what else, who had easily taken down Deeds, made everyone nervous. She might even be an undercover Divine. Several notable figures, despite their great dark power, tried to hide their faces. Most began eyeing the exit. Malevorn could smell the panic working its way through his club, and that made him furious. The unseen, recriminating eyes of his bosses bore down on him. If he didn’t seize control of this situation soon, his reputation, maybe his life, wouldn’t be worth shit.
“What do you think is going on over there on that stage, Darling?”
Angry sweat beaded across his forehead. It was all he could do to maintain his composure. He had no doubt that he could break this tiny bitch into a hundred pieces, and he would do that later, after the crowds had left. But more than anything, right now Malevorn needed to keep his cool, for all to see. He was running a show, just as much as this troublemaker was. He would make damn sure he gave nothing away to any potential, cowardly turncoats.
Darling licked her lips, sending a shiver of lust through the club. Electricity fired wildly through Malevorn’s head for just a moment. In that instant, he saw himself tied up and battered, while this crunch bitch punished him in a way that left him begging for more. He practically slapped himself to restore focus. There was no telling how many of his customers had busted a nut, if they had such images in their own minds. It was a damn shame that he was going to have to kill this girl; she was good. She could have made the club a lot of money.
“I think I’m looking at a bunch of sick fucks who like to get off devouring human souls like livestock, despite the prohibition against such activities in the Overworld.” Her gaze poured across the room. “And don’t think that I can’t see each and every one of you pricks back there.” Several demons jumped at her words.
“Enough!” Malevorn pointed to the stage. “Which one of those souls is your sister?” He would let this Darling take her sibling out, have his crew follow them, and when the coast was clear, end them both.
Darling smiled, then narrowed her eyes at the demon mobster. “You must think I’m pretty stupid.”
Malevorn smirked. “Fine. I will personally dissolve your scrawny, dead ass in a barrel of toxic waste.”
Several staff members reached inside their coats for their weapons, or extended claws or talons. The crowd began to pull back towards the rear of the club and the alleyway exit.
“Bad boys,” Darling replied. “I think you all want to be punished....”
She licked her lips again. This time, instead of being arousing, the gesture made Malevorn’s heart stutter in fear. Somewhere in the lower recesses of his mind, he felt a strong urge to run, screaming.
Shaking his head, Malevorn shouted and charged, confident his massive bulk would make short work of the woman. But, impossibly, she slipped by him as though he weren’t even moving and smashed the back of his head with her holy symbol. It cracked from the impact, and Malevorn went to his knees with stars in his vision.
For the next minute, Malevorn heard more than saw -- for he was thoroughly concussed. Whatever brutality these demons held in their hearts, it paled in comparison to Darling’s. She easily smashed faces and snapped limbs with her blows, hurling huge beasts across the room with little effort, slamming them into tables, stripper poles and the far wall. The mad lycanth’s fur bloomed all over from her wolfen ears to her footpads, her toothy maw extended out into a snout, and her talons had grown impossibly long and sharp, like knife blades. Before Malevorn could stand again, it was over. Bodies and body parts splayed across the club floor in pools of black, ichor blood. Survivors staggered away, crawling to dark corners, under dark tables, or out the back exit, getting as far from Darling as they could. She gleefully licked the blood off her fingers, then finally sprang to Malevorn, lifting him off the floor with one hand. There wasn’t a glint of sanity glimmering in her eyes.
Shifting back into a more human form to talk, she said, “Bad boy,” in a child’s pouty tone, then she growled like a huge wolf. Needle sharp canines still glinted amidst the foamy drool in her wolfish mouth. Her eyes, now yellow and slitted, glowing like hot coals, narrowed into a hungry stare. “Shall I punish you, too?”
Malevorn pissed himself. Darling winced. “Fuck, dude. That’s gross.” She dumped him on the floor.
Malevorn thought momentarily about going for his own cursed blade but decided against it. Instead, he scrambled backwards and pleaded for his life.
“Just take them!” He pointed a trembling finger at the stage. The souls to be sold as fodder had retreated to whatever safe corners they could find, just as terrified as their demon captors. “Take them all and go! No one is going to follow you. I swear it.”
That was true: all of Malevorn’s hardened killers had either fled or been butchered by this tiny psycho human soul.
Darling shrugged. “Well, shoot. You got me, boss. I don’t really have a sister named Amelie, and I sure as hell didn’t give up my night to rescue these little lost sheep you snatched. My girl, Iris, had a really shitty day and is hurting right now. So I just came here to fuck you up. I don’t know if it helps, but it sure doesn’t hurt.”
Darling turned and stared at the shivering lost souls. “Why the fuck are all of you still lingering in the Land of Ghosts!? Get your asses to the afterlife before something worse happens to you!”
One by one, they fled the bar into the eternal night.
Darling sighed. “God, some people just can’t do things the easy way.”
Malevorn trembled. “See? They’re all gone. None of them got eaten, right? So you’ll let me go? You have no reason to kill me now, right? Let’s...let’s talk about a deal."
Darling lashed out with her right arm, now fur-covered and knife-clawed tipped. They cut right through Malevorn’s neck. With a splatter of black blood, his head tumbled to the floor.
The feral part of Iris’s soul, Darling had always been fine playing the role of both surrogate and sin-eater for all of the awful traumas that Walking-Around Iris couldn’t or wouldn’t face. She was fine with that. It was her job. It was why she existed, wasn’t it? Someone had to do it, find and blunt anything that made their shared, immortal soul bleed too much. And since Walking-Around Iris had given up on joints and needles, that work was all the more necessary. That Darling had already begun to forget why she’d come hunting in the Overworld tonight -- a numbing gesture to the stinging, shocking reminder of their baby’s death before their own -- was all the proof she needed that she was doing the right thing.
Before heading home, she briefly considered taking the demon’s severed head with her as a trophy. But that would be gross, right?
Iris stood in the rain and mud of her soulscape. Opposite her stretched an acres-long rolling hillside filled with graves, always with a view of the ruins of Brooklyn in the background. She looked at all the tombstones with surprise. There were so many. Were they all occupied? Or were some just remnants of souls that had passed through? She didn’t know how the place worked. There hadn’t been anyone who could tell her. Rigan seemed to know the most about it -- she spent more time here than any of the other souls who moved freely about Iris’s soulspace -- but if she’d known how it had been constructed or filled, she’d never said.
Iris had been reading the gravestones, searching for two missing souls. Not many had engraved names. Perhaps those who’d passed through on the way to the afterlife had come with no names or identities. She felt little for them and wouldn’t have been bothered if they disappeared. But, with the graves that had names, she felt a strong connection, a nurturing instinct to care for their occupants. And there were now two names she was looking for. One was her lost daughter, whom she’d never met, never held, never built any memories with, at least none that had survived her own death and resurrection.
Amelie. Iris recalled a restaurant of that name that she’d been to as a kid that she’d really liked. Was that the reason she’d chosen the name? Walking along the line of tombstones, she began to wonder who Amelie was. Who she would have become. Which traits would she have taken from Arawn. Which from Iris herself. What hair and eye color. The shape of her nose. What kind of laugh. Would she have been silly like her mom, or serious and thoughtful like her dad? Would she have liked stuffies or dolls or trucks? Or building blocks? Would she have wanted to wear pretty dresses or dirt-stained pants? Preferred cats or dogs? Or maybe snakes? Would she have sought out the camaraderie of friends or retreated to the solitude of books? Would she have sung and danced and painted like her mom or written songs and poetry, camped and fished like her dad? Would she have been a good student? Of course she would have. Her dad was brilliant, after all.
Iris stopped suddenly before a grave that looked like it had been recently exhumed. She’d never seen that before, an open grave in her soulscape. This was it. This was the missing soul. Her hand went to her mouth. She gasped as she read the name on the tombstone: James Allan Ward.
[OUTRO MUSIC: "Hope" by Resonance AU]
Rain, the oracular dragon who’d descended from the Tibetan Mustang Mountains centuries ago, dressed in her kitschy, cat-festooned bathrobe and nothing else, drew her mug of Darjeeling tea to her mouth and breathed in its deep mossy, citrusy scent. That made her smile. Savoring her sip, she placed the tea on her desk amidst a sea of clutter and chaotic energies. Maximum disorder meant more clearly seeing the future.
“Iris Penner,” she said to herself as she closed her eyes and crossed her legs, lotus-style. “Iris Penner. What is there to see about this most interesting of demigods?”
She felt her own familiar home slip away as she peered into the cosmic sea. She found herself standing on a dark, cold, wet, muddy field. Something was terribly wrong. Nothing living moved within her sight, the air heavy with an overwhelming scent of death. She’d experienced death far too many times to count in the millenia of her years. Yet this utter emptiness, like a black void that had swallowed up everything, forced her shivering to her knees.
Black clouds overhead, etched bone white along the edges from electrical discharges, mostly blotted out a palid sky. Rain fell burning, and the oracle felt each mystically-saturated drop scald a bit of her own mana.
Looking around, she saw a Manhattan savaged and torn apart, like the fresh kill of a pack of predators. Remnants of ruined, sundered skyscrapers leaned like bare bones, and concrete and steel and glass rubble piled up like offal. Anything soft and combustible had been burned to ash.
Things moved, but none that was alive. Warped mockeries of machines fashioned to look like beasts or insects crawled along the ground, biting and clawing. With a screech and the sound of rending metal, they fought and shattered into battered, rusted, rotted components. There was no mistaking it. The earth was dead. The Apocalypse, one version of it, anyway, had clearly come.
In the distance, a lone figure shrouded in shadow looked down at Rain. With her divine sight, seeing through all darkness, she could make out the figure’s details. Female, bald, with skin that rippled like water, her body endlessly changed assuming one form, then another, and another. Arms became tentacles, then serpents spitting venom, then paws with vicious-looking hooked claws, then feathered talons, and finally back to arms again. She grew scales over bare skin, then fur, then feathers, and finally skin again, now covered in a poisonous, oily sheen. The irises of her eyes transformed, as well, from slits, to diamonds, to gaping, bottomless black holes, to haunting lights.
Iris had become the face of death, sleek and beautiful and lethal, and she exuded a fearsome aura. Her skin darkened like the night, and her eyes glowed like pale moons. A smoldering abyss burned within her belly. Smiling at Rain, she revealed teeth of sharpened needles. Instead of speaking, she only hissed.
A voice without a body called out. “See, Rigan? See, Arawn? See, Tethra? Isn’t she beautiful now? A true goddess! And she’s ours, not yours. Where Oliver failed, Iris will succeed. She will be our weapon to remake all of the earth before us...”
Rain jerked awake and wiped moisture from her eyes. Trembling, she picked up a faded, dog-eared notebook she’d carried ever since she’d left her heavenly world for the mortal one and began to write down what she’d seen.
Taking a deep breath, she said, “Gods, I’ve got to speak with Iris Penner soon.”
NEXT EPISODE: NOWHERE TO GO